1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to telecommunications data. More specifically, the field of the invention is that of comparative evaluation of telecommunications data.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are many challenges associated with the successful operation of businesses. One of these challenges includes the efficient utilization of the businesses resources. Competition in one form or another forces business owners to constantly evaluate their business resources and determine whether or not they are being efficiently utilized. There are many historical breakthroughs in business resource utilization that have dramatically affected commerce and changed the way business is done.
For example, in the early stages of the automobile industry automobiles were so costly that they could only be purchased by people having substantial incomes. In these early stages, the primary cost of manufacturing was the labor cost. Automobiles were made one at a time. Workmen would either be responsible for a number of different tasks or they would be called upon to perform a specific task at a specific time. In either of these cases the labor resource was not being completely utilized. In the first instance, workmen who were responsible for a number of different tasks typically were not as efficient as they could be at all of the them. In the later instance, workmen were being paid to move between jobs, a cost that was never recovered.
Henry Ford changed all this when he invented a better way to manufacture automobiles—the assembly line. With the assembly line in place automobiles could be manufactured more efficiently by cutting labor costs. Employees were able to work efficiently at a certain position, do one job, do it well, and do it many times over to produce automobiles that were able to be afforded by people of almost every income bracket. Ford recognized the benefit of complete resource utilization. Basically Ford got more bang for his buck. For every hour he paid a workman on the assembly line, the workman was being utilized. Prior to Ford's assembly line, the workman may have been paid to perform a job inadequately or to wastefully move in between jobs.
To this day, labor and materials are still important resources; however, other resources are playing an even more important role in modem business. In order to effectively compete, modem businesses must rely on telecommunications. Whether companies are making themselves more accessible by providing associates with pagers and cell phones or they are conducting business or advertising over the internet, the costs of providing these services are telecommunication resources. At one point in business the telecommunications cost was the fourteenth or fifteenth highest cost of doing business. In recent years this cost has been ranked as high as third or fourth.
To date no one has completely effectively utilized these telecommunications resources. Typically the extent to which these resources are managed consists of shopping for the lowest rate plan possible. Returning to the early automobile industry for a moment, this is the equivalent of hiring workmen who would work for the least amount of compensation. Clearly this technique does not address the utilization of the resource. What is needed is a method or system that allows businesses to determine the utilization of their telecommunication resource. Only when the utilization is determined can companies alter their present utilization to more effectively utilize their telecommunications resource.
Conventional telecommunications rating and analysis is performed by the telecommunications services provider, or by a third party vendor using data from the telecommunications services provider's billing data. These conventional telecommunications rating analysis vendors attempt to provide business entities a way to analyze telecommunications billing data in an organized and timely manner, but fail to provide a comprehensive business entity cost and usage analysis. What is needed is a better telecommunication data analysis system.